Behind the Couch

He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes - the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.  'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'  Despite...

1970 Dir. Daniel Haller When she becomes acquainted with softly spoken oddball Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), little does student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) realise that he plans to use her in a ghastly ritual to summon forth the Old Ones; ancient entities slumbering in another dimension, waiting until the stars are right so they can return to earth. And procreate.  Based on Lovecraft’s story of the same name (written in 1928, published in 1929), this was Daniel Haller’s second adaption of the author’s work, following on from Die Monster Die . Lovecraft’s story concerns Wilbur Whateley, the son of a strange albino woman, Lavinia Whateley, and ‘unknown father’, and the weird events that surround his hometown of Dunwich. Wilbur is instructed in the ways of the occult by his fiendish grandfather and eventually attempts to acquire a copy of The Necronomicon to help him summon the Old Ones. Cattle, and people, go missing in the surrounding area and there’s talk of something hi...